With Halloween only four days away, it’s getting quite late in the game to figure out what you’re going to dress up as this year. Here to the rescue, as always, is VC&G with the first of two parts on last-minute Halloween costume ideas. This first part deals with vintage computer-related costumes. The second part will deal exclusively with video game-related costumes and will be published soon. So if you’re desperate for some ideas, feel free to take a look what we’ve cooked up for you below. And by all means, share any of your own ideas with us as well.

By the way, if you like these, here’s even more costume ideas:
2010 Video Game Edition
2009 Video Game Edition
2008 Video Game Edition
2007 Video Game Edition
2006 Video Game Edition

[ Continue reading VC&G’s Last-Minute Halloween Costume Ideas: Computer Edition » ]

About a month ago, RedWolf posted a column about the first computer he ever used, and it started me thinking about my specialty: computer games. What was the first computer game, of any sort, that I played? I’ve spent some time thinking about it and sorting through the memories, and while I haven’t quite arrived at a definite answer, the list can be narrowed down to a handful of titles. They may not be the absolute earliest games I ever touched, but these are the ones that drew me into the whole sordid world of being a computer geek.

I could take the easy way out, and claim that The Oregon Trail was it and end the discussion there. The Trail was introduced to my whole generation during the early years of elementary school, while we sat in a library full of Apple ][‘s and had a teacher drone on about how to insert a floppy into the drive and close the door. Every school I attended seemed to love having students play it during the “pioneer” section of Social Studies class, but it honestly didn’t make a great impression on me. It seemed boring, repetitious, and almost impossible to win. And while I, like all normal kids, enjoyed leaving my path westward littered with dead animals and broken limbs, it wasn’t a title I sought out on my own for entertainment. It was too much a part of school work to ever be much of a game.

[ Continue reading What Was the First Computer Game You Ever Played? » ]

If you’ve ever wondered what really went on inside the game Super Breakout, then wonder no further. The explanation that Atari contrived is so dramatic and exciting that I’m not even going to make anything up this time. I’ll just read directly from the instruction manual for the Atari 2600 version of the game…

[ Continue reading Retro Scan of the Week: Super Breakout’s Rainbow-Smashing Astronaut » ]

In Part I of “Inside a Hamfest: An Annotated Slideshow,” I gave you an introduction to hamfests. In Part II, I told you about guys who try to sell utterly useless crap for too much money, but I also found some choice non-crap to purchase for very little money. We also met a Simpsons-like supernerd with a passion for redheads (himself) and video games. Below, in the concluding part of the series, we pick up exactly where we left off in Part II.

[ Continue reading Inside a Hamfest: An Annotated Slideshow, Part III » ]

For someone who was highly disappointed with the Generation NEX, I’ll have to admit that Messiah’s latest product looks pretty cool. But then again, the NEX looked awesome when it was announced, and you know how that turned out.

The product is the “NEX Wireless Arcade Stick,” a supposedly arcade-quality wireless arcade stick for Messiah’s NEX system. And that right there is the catch, and it’s a major one: it’s “exclusively” compatible with the NEX system, which is likely a horrible business move on the part of Messiah. Why would they limit a great stick design (which looks…absolutely nothing like a NES Advantage, by the way) to such a cheap NES-on-a-chip famiclone machine when they could probably triple their sales if they included a wireless receiver that worked with a standard NES? This stick is essentially what the Advantage should have been back in 1987, and NES freaks would love to get their hands on it for their own NES. But sorry, folks, you’re out of luck. That’s Messiah for ya — just shy of the target, as always. Gotta love ’em.

So why on earth am I telling you about it?

[ Continue reading Messiah Announces “NEX Wireless Arcade Stick” » ]

I hereby declare: let this monstrosity be spread about the world as the scariest, strangest, and most disturbing Halloween costume ever conceived by mankind:

And “luckily” for me, it has to do with video games. I’m not quite sure what Atari’s marketing department was thinking when they approved (or commissioned?) this costume. Oh wait; I know: money…

“Say, Charlie…we’ve got this great idea…kids can dress up as the game Asteroids for Halloween. Their face will look like a disfigured conglomeration of hollow rocks! We’ll sell ten million units in three months — each family buying two or three costumes a piece because, quite frankly, we shit gold.”

We can only hope that this costume didn’t encourage anyone to shoot little kids in the face. Hmm…perhaps next Halloween I’ll go as one of those big straw archery targets. But hey; the 1980s was a more innocent time.

These images are from the brilliantly entertaining site known as RetroCrush. They have a gallery of some other vintage video game-related costumes that’s definitely worth checking out. Also, some years ago, the curator of RetroCrush compiled a list of the worst Halloween costumes of all time, and sensibly, this costume has a place on the list.

Coming Soon: Halloween costumes based on the racing asphalt in Pole Position, the inky blackness of Pong, and a realistic plastic mask of Donkey Kong’s hairy ass.

After all, he is a donkey.

In Part I of “Inside a Hamfest: An Annotated Slideshow,” I went through an introduction about amateur radio enthusiasts (hams), hamfests in general, and a bit about hams’ hacker-like ethos. Then, during the slideshow, I arrived at the hamfest, surveyed the scene, and made at least one major find. Below, in Part II of the series, we pick up exactly where we left off in Part I.

[ Continue reading Inside a Hamfest: An Annotated Slideshow, Part II » ]

Those of you who have been reading VC&G for some time have probably encountered the occasional mention of “hamfests” in accounts of my collecting adventures. Contrary to what you might think, hamfests have little to do with pork (we here in NC call that a pig pickin’), but a lot to do with amateur radio. For almost a century, amateur radio operators have been called “hams.” The exact origin of this term is lost to history; there literally dozens of stories that speculate on the reasons behind its genesis. So if you take “ham” and combine it with “fest,” as in festival, then you get “hamfest,” which is, essentially, a flea market or swap meet for items that hams find interesting.

Hams were the first electronics hackers, having to make do with whatever parts they could find to build their own rigs long before commercial products for their hobby were available. So when the first personal computers came along — usually in kit form or requiring lots of work on the user’s part to get them running — it was a perfectly logical extension to their hobby. Thanks to their experience with amateur radio, the tinkering required for properly utilizing early, primitive home computers was like second nature to them. In no time, amateur radio enthusiasts had adapted personal computers for tasks like encoding and decoding typed text into CW (Morse code), or using them for RTTY or packet radio communications. Their hacker ethos extended through the decades all the way to the present, naturally making hams interested in all manner of technical devices and knick-knacks, and making hamfests a great place to find such items.

Thanks to my father’s long-standing interest (and profession) in both electronics and amateur radio, I have been attending hamfests since I was a child. The local hamfest that I have frequented most, and that you are about to witness, is an annual event run by the Raleigh Amateur Radio Society (RARS), and is thus properly known as “RARSFest.” This particular RARSFest occurred on April 23rd, 2006, and due to reasons such as getting married and moving shortly afterward, I haven’t had the time to show you these pictures until now. So here we go…

[ Continue reading Inside a Hamfest: An Annotated Slideshow, Part I » ]